Ban social media, lose the marketing war, lose staff

Yesterday I came across a great post: Why multinationals are losing the marketing war, by Chris Rand who asserts:
the biggest barrier to engaging with customers and prospects online remains the corporate IT environment.
He says too many companies block access to tools like Facebook and Twitter just as they used to restrict access to the [...]

Let’s be positive on social media: issue guidelines not bans

According to a November Information Age story (linked in a recent e-newsletter), over half of UK organisations are restricting employee access to social media websites such as Facebook and YouTube due to the threat of litigation. Research among lawyers in the 2009 Litigation Trends survey conducted by US law firm Fulbright & Jaworski asked how [...]

Social Media and Construction Marketing

I am doing the opening talk at a social media and construction marketing pre-conference training day in London on 3 February 2010, organised by Emap Networks, the events arm of the publisher of Construction News, Architects’ Journal and other publications, and run in collaboration with CIMCIG.
The event will re-unite me with former Emap marketing director [...]

Let’s do that Australian thing

The friendly response of the new UK chief construction adviser Paul Morrell to my recent posts generated a few comments, several encouraging him to embrace Web 2.0 to build a conversation with people in the rest of the industry. It seems there is an international trend towards adoption of such techniques.
Reading the Daily Telegraph [...]

A public PS: Paul

Looking back at my open letter to Paul Morrell, I realised that it would probably need to be printed out and posted to him, or at the very least emailed, so perhaps we need a post-script….
A public PS: Paul
I would be delighted to be proved wrong, but I suspect you probably don’t read many blogs, [...]

Now BSD ceases publication too

Rumours began to circulate on Twitter yesterday that another UK construction industry magazine was set to close, and today I read Andy Pearson’s “And Finally…” conclusion to his December 2009 online editorial in UBM’s Building Sustainable Design (BSD):
This is the last issue of Building Sustainable Design. After almost a year of trying to succeed in [...]

Next from UBM: the Building Network

Having seen UBM sister publication Property Week establish an online community in September, Building magazine has followed suit, with The Building Network, also hosted on the Ning platform.
I discovered this after noticing some familiar-sounding links on Twitter. What used to be a flow of news headlines and job vacancies from @BuildingSite now appears to include [...]

Goodbye, CJ

Earlier today, the Twitter grapevine tweeted the news that UK construction industry weekly magazine Contract Journal (CJ) and its website, contractjournal.com, is to be shut down from the end of this month. The announcement by parent company Reed Business Information was made in an email (a tweet from Kirstie Colledge of Simply Marcomms prompted me [...]

More cynical sniping at Twitter costs

Today’s Daily Telegraph has an article, Twitter costs Lord Mandelson’s department £3,175 a year, reporting the UK Department for Business’s calculation of the cost of its employees spent running three Twitter accounts (@bisgovuk, @digitalbritain, @BIS_Science), which have amassed a respectable total of 9,894 followers.
The tone of some of the article is reminiscent of the slightly [...]

Will LinkedIn integration take the Twitter Blinkers off?

Today we learned that LinkedIn, probably the social networking site most widely used by professionals (for whom Facebook is just too, er, social), is going to integrate with Twitter so that users’ status updates could be shared between the two networks.
Straw-polls and anecdotal feedback from recent seminars and conferences for UK construction professionals that I’ve [...]